Cathal Barry
The headmaster of one of the country’s leading Jesuit schools has spoken of the importance of “academic rigour” in religious education (RE).
Belvedere College SJ Headmaster Gerry Foley also called on Catholic schools to develop a “common language” to articulate their unique ethos.
Speaking to a meeting of Catholic educators at Marino Institute of Education in Dublin, Mr Foley warned that without an academic approach, RE risks becoming a class in which a lot of “uniformed discussion” takes place.
Addressing the issue of “absolute truth”, he warned that “personal preference takes precedence over universal value” in society today, adding that teachers of religious education were “partly to blame” for this because “unless there is an academic rigour in RE then you don’t really do it”.
Approach
Making the case for a more academic approach to religious education, Mr Foley said “it helps you to have an informed opinion and it gets you to see things differently”.
The Jesuit school headmaster also spoke about the need for a school to have a “common language” to articulate its Catholic ethos.
“If you don’t have very clear values and if you don’t have very clear vision, the RE teacher is working on their own. They are kind of left at sea and it is almost as if that person is left to do it on their own.”
Noting that teaching students to be “men for others” is a central tenet of Jesuit education, Mr Foley said “it makes it so much easier if the school has a common language that it uses to talk about vision and values”.
“If it doesn’t and if that is confined to the religion teachers or the chaplains, it makes the work of the RE teacher even more difficult because they are not working for the mission of the school,” he said.